Sarah Brahim (b. 1992, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia ; lives and works in Paris, France)

In Search of an Honest Map (2025)
Digital Short Film, Black and White - 6.08 minutes

In Search of an Honest Map (2025) unfolds through an extended gesture in the Saudi desert. As Sarah Brahim walks, dragging her foot across the ground, the movement of her body becomes a line. The desert becomes at once surface, scale, and duration: a space to be crossed, touched, and inscribed. The resulting trace exists only temporarily, erased by wind, movement, and time. Mapping becomes a bodily act — a way of measuring distance through effort and presence. The work searches for a form of orientation grounded in physical experience, where the body comes to remember the landscape through the trace of its passage. Seen from afar, the body becomes a small figure within an immense terrain, while the line it produces remains fragile and impermanent. The work asks what kind of map might emerge from inhabiting a place rather than observing it from above. The piece was commissioned as part of a two-year research project under Villa Hegra, along with films and performance in the desert of Al Ula.

Sarah Brahim is a visual and performance artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the body as a site of memory, transformation, and connection. She trained from a young age at San Francisco Conservatory of Dance and the London Contemporary Dance School and later studied medicine. She examines how bodily gestures create a language to express grief, metamorphosis, the unseen, and our relationship with the natural world, and reflects on embodiment and cycles of social, spatial, and spiritual connection.

Recipient of the 2025–26 Pina Bausch Foundation Fellowship and appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2024, Brahim was also awarded the Baroness Nina von Maltzahn Fellowship in 2023 following her residency at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center in New York. She was shortlisted for the Richard Mille Art Prize 2023 and exhibited at the Louvre Abu Dhabi. She undertook a residency at Lafayette Anticipations in 2025. Her work has been presented at the Saudi Arabian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), La Biennale de Lyon (2022), and her 8 channel film was commissioned for the inaugural Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale (2022). She has been commissioned and took part of the Locarno Filmmakers Academy, and her work is held in the collection of Fondazione In Between Art Film.

Founded in 2023 by Lucca Hue-Williams, Albion Jeune presents a curated artist-led programme from its roster of emerging international artists, many of whom have significant institutional exhibition history. Driven by a commitment to the continued survival of a truly ‘global art world,’ the gallery is a platform for cultural exchange. The gallery space, designed by John Pawson OBE, exhibits international artists with diverse practices, complemented by cross-cultural roaming presentations operated through peer partnerships. Additionally, Albion Jeune runs both a publishing house and a thriving public programme.